Join us in commemorating the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive’s 50th Anniversary!

Professor Amy Catlin-Jairazbhoy will discuss “Tagore’s Transformative Torch,” highlighting the role archives play in the life cycle of musical traditions, from the community through the fieldworker and archive back to the community for new generations.

The UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive was founded in 1961 as a part of the Institute of Ethnomusicology, which was established by Mantle Hood in 1960. Holding over 150,000 audiovisual recordings, the Archive collections include non-commercial field recordings and commercially produced recordings of traditional, folk, popular, and art music from Africa, Asia, Australia and the Pacific islands, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas in a variety of formats. Ours is the joint second largest such archive in North America, and is a crucial component of student, faculty, and staff work in the Department of Ethnomusicology today.

Professor Catlin-Jairazbhoy's talk will center around a recently-begun project, "Tagore's Transformative Torch." A collaboration with the Ethnomusicology Archive and the UCLA Digital Library, "Tagore's Transformative Torch" will create an online repository and point of encounter for the traditional music, dance, and other creative arts (such as puppetry) of the Indian subcontinent. Through its map-based interface, users will be able to see how musical practices have evolved (or not evolved) over time in individual regions, states, and villages. The audio, video, and textual content will come from a vast repository of research stretching back to the work of Dutch ethnomusicologist Arnold Bake starting in the 1930s, through the work of his pupil Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy (founding Chair of the Department of Ethnomusicology), to Nazir's work with Amy Catlin-Jairazbhoy (who continues to make regular research trips to India and Sri Lanka).

Stephen Davison, Head of the UCLA Digital Library, will speak about the Digital Library's role in this and other collaborations with the Ethnomusicology Archive, and the role such collaborations will take in the coming years.